Bring New Life to an Old Laptop

[Dave A]

I had an old Toshiba Laptop I've had for about 8 years or so. It was a real "high-end" unit at that time which
I bought for work with a wide screen.
I planned to use it for rocket stuff in the field but it was getting old, slow and a pain to use.
Here were the issues: that Satellite laptop had a power jack on the side the went bad, it was low on memory for today's standards, the HDD was getting too small and slow.
Luckily, I had done the free upgrade to Win 10 a few years ago so that was one item I didn't have to buy.
I went to Crucial's site (well known for memory and drive upgrades.
I found a Sold State 500GB drive for about $125 and new, 6GB of RAM (max for this machine) for $75. I could have shopped around and get better prices but Crucial guarantees the right items and compatibility.
It recommended I buy a SATA to USB transfer cable. I found the cable and a power jack on Amazon for about $15 a piece.
It all shipped right away.
I followed their steps to mirror the HDD image to the new SSD drive.
Shut it down and installed all the pieces.
It was like having a new computer all over. I was an engineer, in charge of control systems and bought many work stations and laptops over the years. The rule of thumb, never spend more than 50% of the cost of a new computer in upgrade parts. Win 10 now has an option to do a "clean wipe and install of the OS. It would make for even a faster machine but with so many programs Installed and time I do not have ,I left it the way it was.

 

[markkoelsch]

An SSD and a good load of ram can make a world of difference. For most use processors have not been the bottleneck in system performance for quite some time.

 

[Tonimus]

I've got an old Toughbook that I use for field rocketry use. Checking altimeter data and such. I haven't done an SSD yet, but doing a clean install of XP made it WAY faster. 7 was stupid slow on it. I like the Toughbook because it was more or less the last laptop to have a real serial port on it. I can still use it with my old BlackSky altimeter.

 

[Speaknoevil]

Hrocket provides great advice on near-new plus upgrade routes. I have some screaming HP laptops for like $450 all-in with Quad I5, 512Gb SSD and 16Gb RAM. Yes units look a bit "squarish" but they work good on my golf simulator in my basement and of course tracking and simulating rockets.

 

[markkoelsch]

Hrocket provides great advice on near-new plus upgrade routes. I have some sceaming HP laptops for like $450 all-in with Quad I5, 512Gb SSD and 16Gb RAM. Yes units look a bit "squarish" but they work good on my golf simulator in my basement and of course tracking and simulating rockets.

Al ( Hrocket) and I are both IT guys, and we both work in health care. He is right about the HP business class machines. Square is better- leaves room for more ports and such. The trend towards super thin is great if you do not need to connect external devices much- I prefer to have a laptop with ports versus dongals.

 

[OverTheTop]

We have the high end HP laptops (i7 processor) as engineering laptops for work. Plenty powerful, but a boat-anchor when you have to travel with them.

The good news is it is upgraded every three years and I get to keep the discarded unit